Sprocketology - The Cyber Sprocket Blog

As we continue to press the evolution of our SaaS projects we are coming across some age-old problems that amazingly are still alive & well in today’s dev environment.  The part that makes it amazing is that I’ve seen this issue over and over in the past 20+ years of software development.  While I’ve seen some unique “tricks” to get around some of the problems nothing earth-shatteringly different has come about.

The most recent issue, which I’m putting up for discussion here, is how to configure a web app so that the independent developer copies, the staging copy, and the live copy each have their own database.  Yeah, a “just change the config file” trick would work; and sadly is the defacto standard for thousands of PHP apps scattered around web boxes these days.   I’ve also seen some convoluted start up code that changes your DB configs based on your environment.   I don’t like either solution, both of which I’ve posted below to outline the common technique.

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That picture is pretty accurate, except as a Cyber Sprocket developer you could replace “giving up and using tables” with “being forced by Craig to give it another go, with gusto.” IE6 is a horrible browser, because it doesn’t acknowledge those so-called ‘web standards’ that people keep raving about. I’m sure Bill G. would agree. Don’t believe me? Read this.

The picture above is actually the new Firefox browser with a Safari window on top. I downloaded the new browser after hearing a lot of banter about its alleged awesomeness. What I’ve seen so far just looks a lot like Safari - in rendering as well as UI. You can probably tell by the toolbars that I’m very much a minimalist when it comes to GUI, and rely heavily on knowing the keyboard shortcuts in my software toolbelt. After playing with the new Firefox for a while, I still plan on using Safari for regular surfing.

“But, Craig, why do you opt to use a browser that such a small sliver of people use?”

Because its font rendering pleases me and the application starts up 30 seconds faster than the newly released alternative. Testing our work in browsers of various versions and operating systems is a requirement, of course, but for general use, Safari works just fine by me.

What browser do you use? Why? And has anyone found a neat feature in Firefox that could dissuade me from remaining in my comfort zone?

The Cyber Sprocket gang was well represented at May’s meeting of the Charleston, SC Linux Users Group (CSCLUG). We met at Kennedy’s on Calhoun and enjoyed hor d’oeuvres and wine compliments of the Charleston Digital Corridor leadership, Nell and Ernest.

The meeting focused on the open source community’s direction in Charleston, and the future of the CSCLUG. The crowd was diverse and included programmers, friends of programmers, hackers (or “security experts” if you prefer), freelance writers, the economic development masterminds from the Corridor, and of course the Sprocketeers. I mostly played the role of bartender by fetching Nell all the wine she wanted and keeping Ernest’s glass too-full.

Noah Schiffman (the security expert and self-appointed head of the CSCLUG) was available with a couple of laptops running Linux (virtually or natively) that gave us the brief pleasure of challenging our abilities to get Wifi running on distributions of the operating system we’ve not worked with before. At least I got the Mac connected.

Cyber Sprocket is a strong supporter of community efforts to improve open source awareness and to promote an overall improvement in the local technical knowledge base. As the Internet has grown in accessibility and content, we have seen a corresponding growth in the availability of lackluster programming how-to guides that have taught an entire generation how to “do it wrong,” and we are committed to bring this to light and correct it. CSCLUG is a perfect place to jump-start the learning process, simply by means of exposing yourself to new/different technology. If you’re interested in trying something other than the Vista Home Edition that was packaged with your Dell, then come to the next meeting and show your support!

Now for some more blurry, iPhone photography of the event! (after the break)

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What company in their right mind, other than Microsoft, would release a programming environment where they document methods of properties that don’t exist?

I ran into this gem while attempting to program functional network socket clients in the Visual Studio IDE using the ever-so-awesome (read bloated) .Net Framework:

NetworkStream..::.Flush Method
Flushes data from the stream. This method is reserved for future use.

What the heck?

Have any other wonderful Microsoft gems like this one? Please share!